Has The Bleeding Stopped?

I sure hope so.  It looks promising.  Tomorrow I will do a weekly spending recap and see what damage we've done this week (I'm keeping track of our balance, just not where it's spent).  The good news is that there haven't been any new charges to our credit card.  It seems that giving my husband cash to spend on lunch is, do I dare say, working?  The only activity on the credit card is a return I made to a salon.  I didn't like the product, shouldn't have spent the money.  So, I took it back.  As of yesterday, the credit still hadn't appeared on my card after 4 days so I called the salon.  They said that their records showed it was returned the day we were at the store but that she'd pass along the info to her manager.  Magically, the credit appeared today but it was short two dollars.  I'm not going call them on it.  It's just not worth it.

Look How Far I've Come

Even though we have $63,000 in credit card debt, I'm still amazed at how far along we've come.  It wasn't until recently that I began to organize our bills and actually become aware of what the total number owed was.  Again, it was recently that I actually started thinking about how much an item costs instead of just swiping away willy nilly.  Now the hard part is actually spending less than we make.  I think that getting out of debt is a lot like losing weight.  It's a slow process and getting there is hard.  You may have slip ups but you just have to keep going until you get there. Even though our debt has gotten larger since I've started this blog, I'm not going to give up until it's gone.  It will go down and we will be able to spend less than we make.

Budget Allocations

It's Friday and a payday so here's the plan for the next two weeks:

Total paycheck: $804.36

Minus Allocations:

Car Payment: $280
Groceries/Misc: $250
Husband Work Lunches: $80
Gasoline: $80
Mini Savings: $25
Halloween: $25

This leaves $64.36 plus $13.49 left in the checking account totaling $77.85 which is being sent to our personal loan.  I had put the AMEX as the first goal, but the personal loan's interest rate is more than double that of any other debt we have and it has the largest balance.  You might notice that I've budgeted $80 for husband work lunches.  I think that he could make a homemade lunch for a lot less than $40 per week, but he prefers to eat out.  And, no amount of begging and pleading with him to find a way to reduce this amount has succeeded.  So, I suck it up and put it as a line item in the budget.  Does it make me angry? Does it make me resentful?  Yes to both.  Since the school year began, I have eaten lunch out a handful of times and most being my office treating me.  The others being a $4 bowl of soup from Panera.  Oh well.  The mini-savings is for an "Oh crap" moment where we need to pick up some random thing.  This week it was to buy a book from the school book fair.  This money is transfered to savings and if not used, it stays put.  Seemingly the balance could grow but usually doesn't because it's not hard to come up with things to spend money on.  The Halloween money is for a pizza dinner.  We are hosting a couple of my son's friends for Trick or Treating.  I don't think it will be $25 but I'm also including candy to pass out and any other little incidentals.  This week's goal is to track where the money goes.

Excuse Me For A Moment

I was having a small moment of complete and utter freak out on Friday.  I apologize.  Since then, I have had a discussion with my husband and let him know what my frustrations were.  We've both agreed that going to a cash only basis will help stop overspending (or at least slow it).  Starting on Friday (payday).  I will put our cash into its various piles and try to slow the bleeding.  My paycheck Our budget for the two weeks looks somthing like this:

Groceries/Food: $280
Household/Misc: $54
Gas: $80
Allowance: $6
Emergency: $25

Total: $445

This is just the basic budget.  It changes depending on how many hours I've worked in the payperiod.  Anything above and beyond this amount, I'll be sending to the #1 debt on our list.  My husband's paycheck is dedicated to bill paying and such.

Starting Over...Again!

What the f**k?  How do we let ourselves keep going down the path of debt?  I'm so frustrated with myself.  I've let our budget get out of hand and now we're no better off than when we started.  I hate being the only one in my family that spends any energy in worrying about how much we spend.  I'm pissed at myself and I'm especially pissed at my husband.  I'm so tired of being the babysitter.  Not that it matters because noone listens to me anyways.  Why do you think it's okay to tell our son that we will buy him a $60 video that is so obviously not in our budget?  It always comes down to me saying yes or no.  I hate being the person that has to make the reasonable choice.  Something has to change because we are headed down a very dark path.  I am just so exhausted.  Debt is exhausting.  Debt makes me a terrible person.  I am done being the only one concerned with where our money goes.  It's time that my husband is an active participant in controlling our family spending.  Things change today.  I can't do it on my own with no cooperation.